1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to a design support method and system for guiding or navigating a design engineer who performs the design of a specific version of a product, in various manners, such as by presenting job content to be executed by the design engineer.
2. Description of the Related Art
Heretofore, in the process of designing a circuit of a certain product, various parameters of the circuit, such as required circuit components and the positional relationship between the circuit components, have been determined on a trial-and-error basis. Therefore, one design engineer can acquire techniques for designing within a short period of time while maintaining a standard or higher level of design quality only after the design engineer designs circuits of a product family belonging to the same category over and over again. While such repeated experience in circuit design of a product family belonging to the same category allows design engineers to familiarize themselves with the circuit design of the product family and acquire design knowhow individually, the knowhow is generally accumulated only in the individual design engineer, and hardly shared between other design engineers.
From this point of view, there has been known a technique of retrieving database accumulating previous design specifications of products belonging to the same category, and using them as reference information for selecting components of a new product under design, as disclosed in Japanese Patent Publication No. 3288686 titled “Design Support Apparatus and Design Support Program”.
While this technique allows the design specifications obtained by retrieving database to be used as reference information for selecting components of a new product under design, it has been difficult to navigate design engineers with respect to design specifications and/or design items, which are to be considered in an actual design process.